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Excerpts
from Ray Carney's American Vision:Winslow Homer's Breezing Up,
The Cotton Pickers, Homework, New England Country School, The Noon
Recess

Winslow Homer,
Breezing Up

There is almost always a social,
realistic aspect to the work of nineteenth-century American artists, but it
can also be as visionary, contemplative, or romantic as the mostadvanced
twentieth-century European modernists. In particular, it is possible to discuss
Eakins' or Sargent's portraits as realistic social and psychological studies
of particular sitters. It is possible to discuss Hopper's paintings as social
and psychological studies of personal loneliness, failures of communication,
or the bleakness of the modern urban environment. It is possible to discuss
groups of Homer's paintings (his series of schoolmarm and schoolwork paintings,
for example) in similar terms. Such glosses are not wrong, as far as they go;
they just do not go far enough, for the visionary side of the work of these
same painters offers releases from the very categories of understanding with
which these realistic analyses begin and end. To describe these works in conventional
social and psychological terms is to fail to appreciate what is most radical
about them, which is that the imaginative energies they release are unplaceable
within their own realistic structures of representation. They generate intensities
of emotion and imagination that will not be repackaged within tidy narrative
bundles of character and motivation. On the other hand, the imaginative effect
does not have to be gaudy and large to be disruptive of realistic categories
of understanding. Especially in Hopper, Homer, and Eakins, a figure's inwardness
or quietness that makes most him or her eludes the categories of realistic description.

Consider Homer's A Fair Wind (also
known as Breezing Up). His voyagers are embarked on an imaginative voyage
as much as a seagoing one, but the crucial point to notice, in this painting
about balance, is how Homer himself maintains the delicate balance between the
counterpointed tugs of the two realms–the claims of the imagination and those
of the world. Let me consider the figures as imaginative voyagers first. Notice
that there is little or no sense of physical strain in their positions. Their
bodies are relaxed, and they are released from the physical rigors of sailing
a small boat in a high wind, almost as if they were transformed in fact, as
well as in figure of speech, into Emersonian "transparent eyeballs."
Unlike the figures in pre-Raphaelite works, however (and this is usually overlooked
in discussions of the painting), not only are they embedded in the actual world:
Their most salient aspect is that they are not individual, isolated visionaries
but members of a small, tightly knit community. They may be rapt in their own
states of contemplation, but Homer insists that, in the richest sense of the
phrase, they are "all in the same boat." They are engaged in a complexly
interrelated series of practical tasks: one holding the tiller, another holding
the mainsheet, and the two others counterbalancing the craft. Each one's performance
is necessary to keep the small vessel tacking smartly in the strong wind.

Though discussions of the painting
invariably refer to the figures' staring at the horizon, it seems clear to me
that Homer has further emphasized the task-oriented interdependency of their
practical performances by having none of them look at the horizon. The three
younger figures are watching the luff of the sail and balancing the boat, and
the older figure is paying attention to the roll of the boat and the course
along which they are tacking. In short, rather than being a revelry in mere
vision, the painting might be taken to be an allegory of America itself, as
it was thought of by these artists: It is about the harnessing of individual
visions to a complex, interrelated, practical group effort. Homer was guided
by a belief that the life of the imagination could be lived not in contradiction
to but in consonance with the most prosaic practical tasks. One notes the fish
in the bottom of the boat. This visionary voyage has served to nourish more
than vision.

To oversimplify only slightly, the
American idealist position (as descended from Emerson, through Homer, Eakins,
and Sargent, to Capra, Ray, and Cassavetes) may be said to locate itself somewhere
between the physicalism and optical allegiances of Degas, Renoir, and Monet,
on the one hand, and the supernaturalism of the British late-Romantic or Edwardian
tradition on the other. The distinctive differences between these three lines
of modernism can be suggested, a trifle schematically, by comparing a pre-Raphaelite
painting by Burne-Jones, Le Chant D'Amour, a painting by Homer, The
Amateur Musicians, and one by Degas, The Artist's Father Listening to
Pagans Playing the Guitar–all on the subject of music. The Burne-Jones
is an exercise in spiritual incense burning. It is necrophilic perfume making,
entirely dissociated from the actual smells of the real world. The Degas, in
contrast, is a realistic psychological and social study of youth and age, action
and meditation, artist and audience. The interest of the Homer painting is its
ability, in effect, to marry the spiritually of the Burne-Jones with the tangibility
of the Degas. As in the Degas, there are a pair of realistically presented modern
figures (unlike the pseudomedieval ones in the Burne-Jones); however, Homer
deliberately defends against the particularization of character, age, and relationship
that gives Degas' work its strictly practical social and psychological meanings.
Homer's figures avoid these physical and social significations in order to take
on a more abstract, spiritual signification. (In many of his other paintings
he does this–the equivalent to Capra's peopling his films with Smiths and Does
and having them played by actors who embody "blankness" more than
"character"–by deliberately angling the face of his figure away from
the viewer in order to hide it, and by extension to universalize it.) A window,
out of sight, above and behind the figures provides just the slightest nimbus
of light around the heads of Homer's musicians to make their spirituality visible.
(Capra used a key light on the hair of his actresses for the same effect.) In
an earlier version of this painting, Homer put a Gothic window behind his cello
player to suggest the degree to which this is a visionary painting, a painting
about a spiritual opening out of an otherwise quite confining visual and social
space (an imaginative opening out of social and psychological readings of the
painting that Degas probably could not even entertain). Even in this medievalized
version, it is significant, however, that Homer, unlike Burne-Jones, does not
imagine his musicians passing out of the world of actuality through that window.
He provides an imaginative window into a medieval courtyard, but life must be
lived on this side of the window.

These three paintings might be said
to summarize the parting of the ways in early twentieth-century American art.
Childe Hassam and Frank Benson elected to follow the path of Degas, Renoir,
and Monet and adopt the methods of French Impressionism; Thomas Wilmer Dewing,
Edmund Tarbell, and Arthur B. Davies went the route of the pre-Raphaelites into
reverie, romance, and fantasy. It is my contention that Homer, Eakins, Hopper,
and the other American Romantics whose work is the strongest managed to marry
the energies of both traditions, the energies of imagination expressed in the
world.

Perhaps this makes American Romanticism
sound too happy and naive, but in almost every work of art by these artists
it is the failure or pain of this audacious attempt to live the dream in the
world that is documented. (European artists would not feel this failure at all,
since they would not have believed in the possibility of expressing their visions
in the form of the world in the first place.) My individual discussions of Capra's
films will, I hope, amply document the difficulty that this effort created for
him and his characters. One can enthuse over the "visionary communities"
created within A Summer Night, A Fair Wind, and The Amateur Musicians,
but it is important to realize that it is principally the absence of such
visionary communities or the loneliness and difficulty of living in one that
Homer's, Eakins', Hopper's, James', or Capra's work usually documents. There
is inevitably a darker, at times nightmarish, side to the American dream that
involves a recognition of the hazards of the attempt to live the life of the
imagination outside of the support and sanction of social organizations of behavior.
There is an appreciation of the potential bewilderment and estrangement of the
visionary in all of these artists' work. The American meditators in Hopper's
work cannot escape from the drabness of their lives and the tenements they inhabit.
Eakins' marvelously stimulating sitters–the meditative doctors, artists, inventors,
and women he paints–are also lonely and weary. The American sublime is a chilly
home for the social figure....

* * *

Winslow Homer,
The Cotton Pickers

Contemporary reviewers criticized
Winslow Homer's paintings of the late 1870s, invidiously contrasting his work
with that of Monet, because the women in his pictures were not given clear social
roles and statuses; because there frequently was an incongruity between their
costumes and their facial expressions; because there was something imprecise
and undefined about their activities and situations. In pointing out that Monet's
or Renoir's women were seldom guilty of such vagueness of expression and activity,
such mysteriousness and lack of social or psychological definition, they were
only noticing the qualities that link Homer's central figures with most of Capra's
and that make both of them distinctively American expressions. The vagueness,
mysteriousness, and lack of definition, the strange staring off to one side,
out of the (pictorial or cinematic) frame space at something undefined are registrations
of the problematic expression in the world of individual consciousness for both
artists, demonstrations of an awareness of what perhaps can never be expressed
or rendered except through such mysterious vagueness.

It is at this point that any attempt
to assimilate the major artists in the so-called American impressionist tradition
(Sargent, Hawthorne, Homer, Tarbell, Chase, Wiley, Johnson, Beaux, and others)
to the theories and practices of French impressionism breaks down. For all of
the superficial similarities of attention to color, light, and tonal values,
the two traditions operate out of entirely different value systems. In a Metropolitan
Museum catalogue, Dianne H. Pilgrim summarizes the prevailing conflation of
impressionist and realist traditions in arguing, about the work of John Singer
Sargent, that the effect he strove for was the "transcription of what was
before him, defined by light and color." That could serve as a plausible
beginning to an approach to the early French impressionists, but nothing could
miss more of the essential quality of Sargent's work, which is, as I have already
argued in Chapter 2, a study of the expression (or failure of expression) of
individual consciousness in the forms of social life.

To turn to Winslow Homer's work,
one need only compare his Cotton Pickers or Girl with Laurel with
Monet's superficially similar Women in a Garden. (If there were space
for it here, one might with equal aptness compare Homer's Long Branch, New
Jersey etchings with Monet's Terrace at Sainte-Adresse.) The Monet
painting might be taken as a literal illustration of an art in which "The
fruit trees look like women, and the women look like fruit trees"–that
is to say, an art in which there are no awkward discontinuities between the
human and the natural, no residue of consciousness that will not be completely
translated into public, social, worldly action and expression. To reverse Isabel
Archer's dictum, in Monet's painting, clothes–costumes, manners, gestures,
and relationships–express the self perfectly (just as they do in paintings
like Terrace at Sainte-Adresse). Monet and Madame Merle agree. Homer's
work, on the other hand insistently calls our attention to the difference between
flesh and spirit, the mismatching of physical or social and visionary occupations
(literally in Cotton Pickers). Homer creates a gap between the specificity
of the realistic details and the mysterious evocativeness of the expressions
and oblique glances that makes the uneasy relationship of consciousness to ordinary
life the subject of the painting. Monet, in effect, does the opposite, implying
that there is no surplus of socially inexpressible consciousness, that everything
that can be expressed is perfectly expressed by the costumes, poses, and manners
of his figures.

Homer's figures invariably look out
of the frame space, beyond the physical world defined by their paintings. The
presence of the wind and the horizons in many of his works, though not here,
does the same thing: It beckons a viewer to look beyond social valuations and
depictions, moves the viewer to an appreciation of an intangible, gentle sublimity
in which the individual consciousness participates, separated from the group
or the social task at hand and not communicable in effects of light and color.

The result is a conception of the
individual as in some sense "all dressed up with no place to go"–with
a consciousness that potentially will not be expressed or translated into worldly
roles, actions, or identities. The dreamer in Homer is ultimately compelled
to turn outward or inward away from the social group and the realm of the senses
to a state of meditation, reverie, or vision.

This turning away from social interaction
skirts the edges of the pre-Raphaelite dream of world-weary disengagement from
social and ethical concerns, and the resemblance between Fredrick Church's Olana
and the artistic and worldly creations of William Morris and the Rossettis is
telling. The American tradition shares some of the impulses of the pre-Raphaelites.
What distinguishes it, however, is its simultaneous dissatisfaction with the
art-for-art's-sake disengagement from the world to which the pre-Raphaelites
resigned themselves....

* * *

Winslow Homer,
Homework,New
England Country School, The Noon Recess

Such framed rectangular objects on
walls or openings through walls function in exactly the same way in Homer's
and Hopper's work as they do in Capra's. They represent imaginative openings
out of the confined, cramped worlds inhabited by the central figures, even as
they function only as imaginative, and not actual physical or social, openings.
Consider the effect of the window on one side of the boy doing his homework
in Homer's Homework, the windows on either side of the schoolmarm in
his New England Country School, the map, the windows, and the chalkboard
hanging on the wall in his The Noon Recess, or, more generally, the use
of window frames, ledges, horizons, railings, or other strictly demarcated physical
boundaries in Homer's or Hopper's other paintings. Such boundaries or demarcated
limits are invariably juxtaposed against or are used to frame imaginative or
visual openings that represent potential escapes from the physical confinements
of the space defined. The worldly boundary in each case paradoxically outlines
the possibility of an imaginative hole that ruptures it or offers a movement
beyond it.

In The Noon Recess and New
England Country School, Homer's bored schoolmarms, oppressively shut in
by the physical walls of their one-room schoolhouses and the tedium of their
days (just as they are compositionally shut in by the oppressive symmetries,
repeated parallels, barren rectangularity, and visual tedium of the artistic
spaces in which Homer situates them) are offered visionary releases (just as
in much of Hopper's work) through the windows on either side of them. In The
Noon Recess, the more interesting of the two works, Homer attracts our eyes
outward through the windows by calling attention to the activity outside. Inside
is confinement and stasis and silence; outside is movement and noise and freedom,
and the echoing of the diagonal posture of the boys in the window behind the
teacher with the teacher's own diagonally presented figure suggests her imaginative
yearning for their state of freedom, free movement, and free expression, even
as her looking in the other direction implies her inability to participate in
their freedom. However, the movement that interests Homer most is not physical
but imaginative. By positioning the map on the wall just over the head and to
one side of his figure (a device previously employed by Vermeer), he tells us,
in effect, that the subject of the engraving is imaginative movement. His teacher's
glance outward is actually evidence of a meditative turn inward. The actual
state of the children playing outside is unavailable to her and ultimately unimportant.
In looking outside she is meditatively entertaining possibilities of escaping
westward, literally or metaphorically, beyond both the school room and the children
outside, beyond the physical, social, and expressive confines of school life
altogether, imaginatively beyond all of the surfaces and figures rendered in
the work itself. The work indicates its own expressive limits.

Some of Homer's open-air compositions,
such as The Dinner Horn and the Long Branch series of etchings
and paintings, though they cannot use walls, windows, maps, or pictures in this
way, complexly use the visual effect of juxtaposing a severely bounded foreground
against an unbounded background space defined by a distant horizon to the same
purpose. The eye is enticed into passing from socially costumed and encumbered
figures, who are physically immobilized by a ledge or railing in the foreground
of the painting (and formally immobilized by their placement within the composition,
off to one side of it, or close to one edge of it) across and beyond these worldly
and formal boundaries through the pictorial space to the sea or the unbounded
horizon beyond. This is what might be called the transcendentalizing impulse
in Capra's, Hopper's, and Homer's work. Figures physically, socially, and formally
confined are offered imaginative releases from their entailment and immobility.
The social body is (and must be) left behind in order to free the visionary
eye to movement. All three are equally artists of the spirit whose spirituality
involves spiriting the body away, dissolving the I into an eye. I emphasize
that the common ground among the three is that the movements they are interested
in are not social or physical but meditative and imaginative. One can look through
a window or reach out visionarily toward the west or the horizon, but since
one is not a transparent eyeball one cannot actually transport oneself (except
in a visionary sense) outward along the line of sight or actually pursue one's
own meditative path out of the world. George, on the edge of his group of friends,
relatives, and neighbors, off to one side standing and listening to the ringing
of the bell on the Christmas tree, is in the line of Homer's girl of The
Dinner Horn, standing half within, half outside of the domestic space of
her circumscribed existence and enticing our imaginations outward into the fields
with the unheard sound of the horn she blows and to which she listens.

Books are another rectangular opening
out of the physical space of a painting that appear consistently in the work
of Vermeer, Homer, and Hopper, and, even more obviously than windows or doors,
they represent purely imaginative openings out of confined spaces. Homer's young
girl reading, in The New Novel, like the boy looking into his book in
Homework, and like the ubiquitous book readers in Hopper's paintings
are momentarily released from the world, as much as if they were physically
transported out of their bleak surroundings. Brando's and Dean's anguished Method-motivated
sighs and frantic turns away from the groups of people surrounding them, like
George Bailey's picking up Clarence's book from the collection basket and reading
the inscription in it at the end of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life,
are directly in the line of these trapped visionaries and dreamers, enclosed
as they are in confined and confining social and physical spaces, but moving
beyond their walls in meditation and day dreaming...

This
is only the "To Print" page. To go to the regular page of Ray Carney's www.Cassavetes.com on which this text appears, click
here, or close this window if you accessed the "To Print" page
from the regular page. Once you have brought up the regular page, you may use
the menus to reach all of the other pages on the site.